My weblog features 327 word pieces, no more, no less. the 327 word essay is a time-honored form made popular (at least to me) from the days of my zine and website: 327: A Publication by and for People Born on March 27.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Weird

Had the strangest dream last night, the gist of which was that after you die, you can time travel through your life, using your former body to do so. Essentially, you’re able to visit any event you lived through, just so long as you don’t run into the “actual” you, who is going through your life linearly.

In the dream, I discovered this by accidentally doing just that: I happened upon my younger self with a group of former colleagues at a conference or something at some hotel. Imagine trying to convince your younger self that your older self was you: in the dream, the “linear” me looked askance at the time-traveling version and quickly moved on.

As strange as this sounds, I halfway believe it may be how things work. Once, for instance, when we were living in Paris in 1988, I saw this old guy across the aisle on the Metro and had this vivid flash that he was me some fifty years or so in the future. And I came to believe in the few minutes we sat across from one another, that he somehow knew what I was thinking and that indeed, it was the case.

The universe is an awfully big place and there’s probably way more to it than meets the everyday eye; I tend to be quite skeptical about the supernatural, but doesn’t mean I think that only the empirically-provable is real.

In my dream last night, there was a part where I was being counseled by some sort of disembodied wise spirits to not resist the weirdness that was happening to me. They “told” me that I had to keep my eyes closed until the sun came up in order to make my time-traveling abilities “stick.” It seemed like good advice at the time and even if it doesn’t end up enabling me to visit my life after I die, at least it contributed to a good night’s sleep.